The HBAR Foundation, an organization that directs the development of the Hedera ecosystem by providing grants and other resources, this week announced the launch of a $155 million Crypto Economy Fund to bootstrap Hedera Hashgraph’s decentralized finance ecosystem.
The Crypto Economy Fund is focused on increasing accessibility into and within the Hedera Network while accelerating the growth of the HBAR economy. The Fund expects to allocate up to $60 million in grants to DEXs, which may be used as liquidity rewards, furthering the development of the decentralized Hedera ecosystem.
A recipient of the Crypto Economy Fund grant is Stader Labs. This liquid staking project allows users to stake the native Hedera token (HBAR) and receive liquid HBARX tokens.
Liquid staking enables staked assets to be used as collateral for lending, yield farming, and other DeFi opportunities while allowing users to continue accruing staking rewards and securing the protocol. With the fund’s support, Stader will accelerate its mission to create a more secure decentralized staking infrastructure that evolves the proof-of-stake paradigm.
“We’re thrilled to be expanding to Hedera,” Amitej Gajjala, CEO of Stader Labs, said. “With its carbon negative, low-cost environment, and secure finality, the network is perfectly primed for DeFi expansion.”
Hedera Hashgraph is home to more than 500 blockchain projects, with more than a dozen focusing primarily on decentralized finance solutions. These include Sagewise, an intelligent contract software development kit; Hearo. gm, a decentralized, global music marketplace; and Cryptotask, a decentralized freelancer marketplace.
The company’s recent Smart Contracts 2.0 launch introduced Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility and support for Solidity developers, enabling new opportunities for programmable digital assets on Hedera. The upgraded smart contracts have also made transactions 13 times faster on the Hedera mainnet when compared to Ethereum.
“Our goal is to bring the DeFi ecosystem to Hedera so that power users can benefit from Hedera’s scale and low cost,” Shayne Higdon, co-founder and CEO at the HBAR Foundation, said. “This level of cost, performance and scale is critical as more institutions and consumers come to Hedera for issuing tokens, swapping assets, and engaging in the crypto economy.”
Hedera uses a directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure which increases transactional speed and efficiency as more transactions are added to the network. Hedera processes around 2.6 million transactions per day, with transaction finalization times of 5 seconds. Hedera’s DAG structure makes it far quicker and more efficient than Bitcoin and Ethereum, which currently process around 300,000 and 1.2 million transactions per day.